This invention relates to electronic musical instruments which are provided with a bar code reader for reading bar code data from a recording medium on which bar codes representing predetermined musical data are printed.
Recently, electronic musical instruments having an auto play function, which is obtained by preliminarily storing musical data including tone data constituting a predetermined piece of music in a predetermined memory, and by which the individual tone data are automatically and successively read out from the memory according to the progress of music to produce automatic performance of that piece of music, have been developed.
For storing tone data in the memory, various methods of coupling the tone data to the memory have been contemplated. For example, it has been the practice with electronic keyboard musical instruments to let tone data corresponding to operated performance keys be directly and successively coupled to the memory, or transfer tone data preliminarily recorded on an external recording medium such as a magnetic tape or a magnetic card to an intermal memory.
The method of coupling tone data to the memory by operating performance keys, however, requires actual performance of melody, which is considerably difficult to beginners as well as giving rise to many errors and requiring, long time for coupling the data. The method of coupling data via a magnetic tape or a magnetic card, requires an expensive recording medium. In addition, the storage capacity is usually small, thus imposing, restriction upon the quantity of data to be coupled.